Exploring a unique and untapped market, Wizara is launching its first exhibition featuring Arab, African and Asian artists, presenting their NFTs for the first time on the blockchain. Wizara is a blockchain based ecosystem, founded by artists for artists. It is the first pan-regional platform of its kind, founded by Adam Kucharski, Adham Hafez, and Mona Gamil. It curates exhibitions, commissions new projects, offers consultancies to museums and cultural institutions, as well as support collaborations in art, science, and technology.
ARQAAM, Wizara’s first exhibition, invites over 20 artists from countries as diverse as Egypt, South Korea, India, Syria, Tunisia, Armenia or Lebanon, to present work that looks at digital art in the 21st century, in relation to pressing questions about culture, the environment, and technology. ARQAAM is curated by Adham Hafez, a New York based curator and artist, and Irish Egyptian digital arts curator, writer and artist Mona Gamil.
Of its many different artistic works there are some that push the medium of NFTs to its limit. Ahmed El Shaer’s collaboration with AI, to produce images that represent the afterlife and heaven from the perspective of a machine, presented in the form of digital drawings entirely created by artificial intelligence. Lamia Gouda retells the history of transformed and destroyed urban spaces, by connecting NFTs to her staged urban performance acts, while narrating historical accounts through the figure of a digital puppet. Mey Seifan created nightmarish choreographed video loops revisiting dreams she has collected over the past ten years, from people living under states of emergency. On the theme of dreams also, Fahad Salim, the first NFT artist ever from Oman, is documenting his lucid dreams as surrealist digital drawings, minted and immortalized over the blockchain. And architects turned artists, such as Nvard Yerkanian, or Ansh Kumar, are developing augmented reality works that redefine the space around us, creating temporary monuments.
Parallel to ARQAAM’s exhibition, Wizara is hosting a series of talks and panels during the months of November and December, that bring key figures from the fields of art, technology and finance together into curated public conversations. ARQAAM runs from 14 November to 4 December 2021.
For the full exhibition catalogue, to attend the events, and to access the collection, visit www.arqaam.xyz
For more on Wizara,
visit www.wizara.io
www.instagram.com/wizara.art
www.twitter.com/wizara_art
